THE POLITICS OF COURTSHIP

...Moliere satirizes them for refusing to call a spade a spade...

...In that great but neglected Precieuse work La Princesse de Clèves by Madame de Lafayette, the widowed princess refuses to marry the man whom she loves and who loves her, ostensibly out of duty but actually out of fear and anxiety: Monsieur de Cleves was perhaps the only man in the world capable of continuing to love after marriage . . . . perhaps his passion had not 58 lasted but that he found none in me...

...Somehow, behaviorists never see this as any norm to follow, although the example seems just as "natural" as that of the chichlid fish...

...It was one reason for their enhancement of courtship...

...The idea of nature as a gigantic bedroom, for example, has been a staple of seduction poems since antiquity...

...It is disconcerting to note that the same kind of precopulatory indifference that has marked the traditional treatment of the prostitute is now exhibited to the women in the so-called singles scene...

...My favorite is the tree cricket Oecanthus, who signals by means of a sweet liquor produced by his own body—an attractive prospect to anyone who has worked up a huge bar bill for the same purpose...

...Our innumerable sex manuals make a number of techniques available to interchangeable partners, much the way our fast food chains dispense the same fare to all corners...

...It is generally those who wish to preserve the status quo who point to nature for support, and this tends to make mother nature the arch conservative of the universea myth that even the briefest look at our evolutionary history should dispel and yet, it prevails...

...But what Mme...

...There were others...

...No doubt human females have 62 had some say in the matter of sexual selection and must bear at least part of the blame for the chauvinist type...

...The mythological view of the world may be dead in certain branches of theology today, but it is alive and well in ethology as any cursory glance through the maledominated literature on animal courtship will amply demonstrate...

...or, we might simply redefine it...

...how much self-esteem, youth, manhood, and vigor must one have to be sure of producing in a woman that doubtful and unsatisfying impression of pleasure...

...Though such courtship would be predicated on respect and attraction, it would probably not depend on exaltation of the object...

...As a result of being brought up in isolation, this gander would only mate with corrugated metal...

...If, as Marxists say, traditional courtship for marriage was oppressive to women by masking its basic motive—the exploitation of the reproductive labor of women—then lack of courtship or the "new" courtship seems hardly better...

...Not that every activity would necessarily have consummation as its goal, to be recorded on some sexual score board, but at least fear would not be a deterrent...

...That of pain, on the other hand, requires nothing at all," confides one of the Marquis de Sade's characters...

...Among animals, courtship—that is, behavior for the purpose of sexual arousal—is either a preliminary to reproduction or a reinforcement of sexual bonding...

...But the most recent edition of the Britannica seems to proceed on the same assumption...

...Freud's bed was less crowded, containing only four in all, the two lovers and their parents of the opposite sex (today one must also include their two analysts, I suppose), but his was a similar point...

...Somewhere in our evolutionary journey, we left estrus, that state of temporary sexual excitement that prevails in animal life, and migrated to a state of perennial sexual interest...

...There is no question that the animal courtship requirements of territorial confines, display, rivalry, and release are fulfilled in the bar scene, but whether this represents courtship in any human or humane sense I seriously doubt...

...The "nuptial flight" of the drone, for example, is followed by something other than an ecstatic honeymoon...

...Gibbons, for example, are not sexually differentiated in any significant way...

...It turns out that vocalizations are less those of "triumph" than fatigue-"desist-contact" signals, in the case of the rat, anyway...

...Somewhere in all of our heads is the fantasy of the great sexual experience that transcends all considerations of time and place...

...The question is, what have we substituted for it...

...but I should not have the same way of preserving yours...

...In a charming modern bestiary, the French author Rostand writes, without objecting to it apparently, that with every naked couple in bed, there is always a third party present, that of society...

...Besides, we have succeeded so well in eliminating prohibitions, if there were to be anything like courtship in the old sense, we would have to create obstacles first...

...With sufficient ego strength, one wouldn't have to turn the lover into a private minigod...

...But what it reveals beneath its gloss of romantic wish fulfillment—perhaps the female equivalent of 59 pornography is a brutal quest for economic survival...

...I even think your constancy is owing to the obstacles you have met with...

...Right now, it is believed that the sexes are dimorphic in the matter of visual and tactile appeals, men supposedly more responsive to the former and women to the latter...

...Faberge now has a cologne called Macho Macho Man, the implication being, of course, that a macho man is much man...

...This is not to say, however, that we must grant primacy to biology, as some conservatives insist...

...The Marquise de Merteuil is a "scientist of the emotions" who, herself without feeling, destroys men with a mathematical precision...

...No wonder women encouraged it, as a safety valve within an intensely patriarchal system...

...It is under such diminished circumstances for erotic possibilities that manuals for courtship and sexual behavior arise...

...Konrad Lorenz, the last of the eminent Victorians, sings the praises of the greylag gander who woos the "virginal" and "modest" female and exhibits lifelong fidelity to her in the "most beautiful bond of all, matrimony...

...I have not yet spoken of that form of courtship that most of us would consider most "natural": courtship for marriage...

...Perhaps understandably, considering that his essay "Courtship Through the Ages" first appeared in 1939, Thurber assumed that the female of the species—from crabs up to humans—had to be cajoled or cudgeled into sex...

...I say perhaps because there may be something in the biology of men that would be violated by such behavior...

...The brothers Goncourt wrote of the famed 18thcentury Les Liasons Dangereuses (Dangerous Alliances), "Seduction becomes an art equivalent in treachery, faithlessness, and cruelty to that of tyranny...

...Here one finds some interesting parallels between animals and humans...

...The great prohibition from Biblical times on down has been self-love, onanism...

...In the Western world, when love and marriage were united in the urbanized Renaissance, much of the courtship pattern of the adulterous Middle Ages was injected into premarital relationships...

...With equality—we have hardly begun to explore some of the problems in this highly ambiguous term—the tenuous system of checks and balances that has prevailed for so long could perhaps be discarded...

...Perhaps we have substituted a spatial for a temporal signal, an environment for a ritual...

...We should bear in mind that in many, perhaps most, periods and cultures, marriages are arranged and courtship does not precede marriage at all although it may follow it as part of sexual bonding...

...A recent issue of Science magazine describes "femme fatale" fireflies who "lure" male members of different species to a culinary death by imitating the signals of the female members of those species...

...But while we seem quite willing to dispense with it, Ovid recognizes courtship as the civilizing force that, by refining and polishing us, spurs us on out of barbarism...

...Courtship" under such circumstances often takes the form of a tantalizing arousal and denial at same time, forcing the male to propose, since marriage is his only route to sexual satisfaction...

...yet they have pair bonding, whereas the dimorphic chimps, gorillas, and orangutans do not...

...There would be mutual exchange of gifts, in support of each other instead of in support of a voracious narcissism or a voracious economy...

...This is revealed in Castiglione's famous manual The Courtier, where, incidentally, there is an almost unisexual ideal of what makes the two sexes attractive, something that later centuries get away from...

...When his beloved can was itself hauled away in a garbage truck, the gander was so distraught, he chased it until he was killed in traffic, a martyr for love...

...Liberation is now defined as the freedom to be feminine as well as feminist, which makes the economy doubly happy: fantasy clothes for night and dress-for-success uniforms by day stuff the wardrobes of the "liberated" woman—and the pockets of the successful ad man...

...For in her position of economic dependence in the sex relationship, sex distinction is with her not only a means of attracting a mate, as with all creatures, but a means of getting her livelihood, as is the case with no other creature under heaven...

...Though the courtship of one may be the only major form of courtship we have, nobody is particularly happy with it...

...In a sermonlike tone that seems to exhort similar behavior on the part of humans, sociobiologists and ethologists of the malebonding school report that this extraordinary creature is totally unable to perform sexually unless the female is prostrate with awe...

...Not only does human courtship sometimes have nothing to do with marriage and reproduction, it may even be used to delay the sex act indefinitely...

...In the past also, men and women no doubt were combatants, but it seems their matches usually took place outside the bedroom...

...While the rules of animal courtship always apply to the entire species, human courtship has often been limited to those of the upper classes or those aspiring to them (although, in the modern period, it has sometimes been used to delay marriage among the poor...

...Yet despite our professed egalitarianism, a look at the department store ads of any issue of the New York Times yields a similar view today...

...Also fascinating in the spectrum of courtship behavior is the male cichlid fish...

...Such sports, of course, were only open to women of the upper classes...

...The elimination of courtship may work against that very sexual salvation that each sex now seeks so earnestly for itself...

...This is as true for Laclos's heroine as for his hero...

...It is possible, of course, that we are the ones that are fooled, but we now feel that "scientific" findings are all too often dependent on economic models...

...Man, in supporting woman, has become her economic environment," wrote Charlotte Perkins Gilman, more than a century later...

...Our current sexual freedom with its denial of pair bonding is a highly effective way of discouraging reproduction...

...The ad man is the pander between the self as lover and the self as object, bringing the two together in a relationship that we still view as forbidden, as witness all the guilt over our so-called narcissism...

...But nobody who wants romance calls a spade a spade...

...While dimorphism in birds is a fact of nature, differentiation in humans is enhanced through artificial means—purposeful inactivity, for example, and conspicuous consumption in dress...

...It is perhaps nothing more than a type of mutual caring...

...At least in the popular treatments, whenever courtship is described, politics isn't far behind...

...At this moment, we cannot be sure...

...Nor would this courtship need obstacles to thrive...

...Once certain gains are made, however, restrictions tend to be relaxed...

...But it's not just literature that mirrors him...

...We hope that the right product will make us whole, just as we once had hoped—how far away that illusion now seems—that the right man or the right woman would make us whole...

...There is the Hepialus butterfly who attracts by means of perfumes—or perhaps I should say colognes, since it is the male who emits them...

...By the time we reach the 18th century, the right marriage was of importance to the woman in ways that it had not been previously, for, as Ian Watt has pointed out, it determined all of her emotional, economic, and geographic happiness in an age of economic individualism...

...Readers less romantically inclined can find support for a promiscuous male "nature" in the behavioral accounts of primates with "harems," a rather exotic term for female groups with a single male attached...

...In the new courtship, women could perhaps be as overtly aggressive (again the term is unfortunate, but I trust the reader will correct the connotative seasonings) as men in sexual initiation, without incurring their traditional epithets of harlot or sorceress...

...This tale of a servant girl who wins her master by keeping her petticoats down and his pulse up was preached about from the pulpit as illustrating the rewards of virtue...

...Fears that 60 used to be dispersed in the rituals of courtship are now displayed in the ringside of the bed...

...We do not as yet know what they are...

...Whom he means by "us," however, is the crucial question...

...As far removed as animals may be from us, they provide us with analogies, those statements that Freud said prove nothing but make us feel more at home in the world...

...The Greeks did have courtship, but in homosexual relationships only—their marriages were arranged—which would seem to give the lie to those feminists who find courtship a mode of dominance of one sex over the other...

...One finds such defensive behavior in the animal world also, although not necessarily in relation to the opposite sex...

...A new courtship would perhaps allow for different personality types, determined not by sex but by temperament...

...True, female monkeys are said to "present" themselves, but somehow this is viewed as mere "receptivity," in contrast to male peacocks actively ruffling their feathers, for example, or male nightingales vocalizing, an example perhaps of the male bias against female sexual initiation more than any bias in nature itself...

...The term courtship with its echoes of courts and ladies leaves much to be desired in the way of scientific objectivity, but this does not prevent animal behaviorists from spinning out many a fanciful tale of animal wooing and wedding...

...In the affair of Helen and Paris, for example, there is no wooing...

...When it comes to courtship, we lack many of the built-in advantages of animals, having to supply them at the liquor, drug, and clothing stores—a necessity that once led Lord Chesterfield to grumble that the expense of sex was damnable...

...It is still amusing...

...At the court of Marie de Champagne, Andreas Capellanus (Andrew the Chaplain) wrote a book that is still highly influential, even in our anticourtship age: The Art of Courtly Love...

...but courtship was a lifetime commitment—requiring a monastic discipline...

...In that sense he is very modern...

...It can be that but, obviously, it doesn't have to be...

...The old pattern at least obscured some of the hostility between the sexes...

...This does not mean, of course, that methods of sexual arousal do not exist among animals, only that our view of them is rather biased...

...Even in highly restrictive periods, the human female is urged to practice a similar freedom...

...We have an even greater problem...

...As more women enter the forest to study primates and the rat race in order to study humans, the customary bias against female courtship will give way to a more objective view of biological facts...

...A rather different view is held by female behaviorists with whom I have spoken, which 56 demonstrates that what is pronounced "nature" all too often depends on who does the viewing...

...There is this difference, however...

...Of course, the economy thrives on the fears and needs of both sexes...

...If women do not want this equation, it will ultimately disappear...

...Although some modern Aesops in male chauvinist dress assert that sexual dimorphism (marked differences in appearance between the sexes) leads to pair bonding and that increased dimorphism leads to more pair bonding, there seems to be no correlation between the two in the animal world...

...It may be that hindrances to sexual gratification were necessary in the past because they alone could give members of an inferior sex, or class, or age group—as in the case of the Greek homosexual youths—some status...

...I t is just possible, however, that we have not eliminated courtship but rather changed its form...

...Among humans it is often neither...

...New social movements tend to be puritanical—and feminism was no exception, despite its apparent plea for sexual freedom...

...One might say that the "correction" of nature provided by contraception enabled courtship practices as controlling devices to disappear since it eliminated the fear of sexual consequences...

...From Tristan and Isolde's love potion to Isadora Wing's "zipless fuck," literature and fiction bear testimony to our wish for the primacy of biology to assert itself, our assumption being, rightly or wrongly, that sex is the rock bottom of our nature...

...Male monkeys, for example, will "present" themselves to their male superiors, as a sign of submission...

...This sounds remarkably like Freud centuries later: "some obstacle is necessary to swell the tide of the libido to its height...

...In our quest for the "natural," we forget that animals are not creatures of such urgency...

...Such a courtship would not aim at manipulation or economic advantage...

...Much of the love literature of the West (and the social conventions related to it) has to do with one or the other of these possibilities...

...Considering the plethora of vibrators that peer out of plate-glass windows and the paeons to masturbation that line the shelves of Brentano's, we are obviously much more tolerant of such love now than formerly...

...Unless they are pointing out the diabolical nature of female sexuality, however, poets do not speak of what happens to the males of some of these insect species after mating...

...Contrary to popular opinion, there is no love either, but that is another story...

...Trappings once used to attract the other are now used to court the self...

...Women always have to be good, it seems, as much on the ladder of evolution as in the garden of Eden...

...Such is the situation in Richardson's Pamela, that primary textbook for the professional virgin in fiction, films, and life...

...But how can we be sure when all our training conspires to such results...

...But the techniques of courtship have also been a means of releasing aggression...

...In the Middle Ages, marriage was contracted much as any other financial arrangement and was often terminated—by the male—when more attractive prospects came into view...

...It is comforting to remember that even so great a suprematist as Darwin felt that females were active in the matter of sexual selection, opting for bigger, stronger males, for example, because they had reproductive advantage...

...We are left with the uncomfortable possibility that if one function of courtship has been to contain violence, then one result of relinquishing it is the explosion of aggression...

...otherwise, they are doomed...

...Our own follies and foibles are thereby projected onto the animal world, where they lead a colorful if imaginary existence...

...The Encyclopaedia Britannica's section on "Animal Courtship" amused James Thurber some years ago...

...The fear of biological consequences was very prominent among the 17thcentury Precieuses, those ladies of the court of Louis XIV...

...Surely the most poignant tale of romantic love in recent literature is Emily Hahn's recounting of the case history of the greylag who lived and died—for a garbage can...

...Being a Don Juan is now year-round work...

...In ancient Rome, the god of love was often depicted as no more than a chubby boy with gilt-tipped arrows...

...And it is related to love...

...It would be more "natural...

...Still, all is not lost...

...Afterward, he and his mate move into a far smaller unit built by the female...

...The term "courtship" as I have been using it in these last pages is obviously based on an egalitarian model...

...A rather different view of supposed postcoital merrymaking appears in Science magazine's account of the "ultrasonic postejaculatory songs" of the male rat, perhaps because one of the investigators was a woman...

...For there is one object that we glorify, not for the moment, but, in the tradition of romantic courtship, for a lifetime—and that is the self...

...There are some exceptions, mainly in literature, that hotbed of subversive activity, but even they tend to represent the point of view of the dominant group, and an exploitative one at that...

...In the new form of courtship, both sexes might well appeal to each other through different sensory means: visual, tactile, auditory, depending on predelection and circumstance...

...Human reproduction has sometimes seemed equally brutal, with regard to the female of the species, at least, which may be one reason why human courtship has sometimes been used paradoxically as a means of delaying the sexual act...

...For that reason alone, it might be worth changing its name...

...As for creating obstacles to heighten sexual pleasure, we have in some way done that too...

...What is extraordinary about the relations of men and women today is that the battle of the sexes is taking place in the sex act itself...

...As one of my friends put it, it may be that anatomy determines many destinies rather than a single destiny...

...Just as the most gorgeously plumed birds are those who contribute little to subsistence, their looks alone providing their attractiveness for sexual selection, so too the human sexes are most differentiated when women contribute little to economic life...

...Only the rich, it seems, deserve the fair and only the rich can afford to be fair...

...still, it is enough of an obstacle to present a challenge to courtship...

...Since the women depicted in the love lyric, at least, were generally of higher social rank than the poets, there may well be some truth in the "bread-and-butter" theory that sees in this mode of courtship a means of entre into higher circles for the male...

...What has not been sufficiently recognized, at least on any theoretical level, although jokes about it are legion, is that courtship for marriage has been practiced as much by women as by men, and it has sometimes been a pretty grim business...

...He therefore refuses to instruct them in the art of courtship, something, it seems, that doesn't come naturally to humans...

...It was primarily this exacerbated economic dependence that encouraged the extreme sexual differentiation of the Victorian era, which ended with women looking more like upholstered armchairs, as George Bernard Shaw remarked, than women...

...There is much evidence today that the fear of being duped and of being unable to please often leads to male violence in fantasy and sometimes in fact...

...Her princess seeks to prolong courtship not the heighten her desire but rather to mitigate the disparity in power between the sexes...

...One might expect such a view in the fiercely hierarchical Middle Ages...

...A sexual releaser for those who enter its doors, its activities bear some remarkable resemblances to the ritual of the ruff, Philomachus Pugnax, a European shore bird...

...But we can't go back even if we would, less perhaps because women no longer want to be sexual objects than because men no longer want to worship them...

...In an age of industrial capitalism, Darwin saw women as the repository of religious values, as a museum of the primitive...

...For this reason, female animals as well as female humans are the objects of sexually tendentious observations...

...For Ovid, courtship is strictly an extramarital affair, designed to enhance sexual pleasure...

...Assuming that some kind of equality between the sexes is possible, a very different courtship from the traditional one would be necessary...

...We are willing to spend any number of years in any number of therapies to achieve the elusive object...

...It was perhaps only "natural" that one outcome of courtship for manipulation and control should be force, and here it is certainly the men who come out on top...

...Yet, no doubt, here also there is accommodation to the environment...

...This more than any new romanticism may be the underlying 61 meaning of the current emphasis on fantasy dressing—even among so-called feminists...

...Even Rousseau recognized that male dominance depends on female acquiescence...

...He always dies, his stomach destroyed in the act of ejecting his sperm...

...Sade is one of the fathers of the heroine-as-victim figure that invades 19th-century literature like plant rot...

...Under such conditions, courtship for marriage became exceedingly important...

...What does seem to exist, however, is an environmental or economic basis for dimorphism in nature...

...Conversely, sexual consummation of the most striking sort often has nothing to do with courtship...

...Yet, in some strange way, we may have already met the required conditions...

...Despite the use of the term love in his titles—a term that included the concept lust in many languages until the 19th century when the two were divorced—Ovid seems interested in commitments that often last for only an afternoon or evening at a stretch...

...de Lafayette also recognizes and Freud doesn't point out is that the purpose of courtship is often different for the two sexes...

...In the Middle Ages, courtship became indissolubly bound up with love, but a love 57 that was extramarital...

...What the one-night stand of the bar scene reveals is less the fulfillment of biological need than obedience to cultural dictate...

...The terrain of bodies "loved" and left, often with fruit blasted in the womb, stretches from one continent to another in 19th-century literature, partial proof perhaps that widespread liberation would only be possible with widespread contraception...

...It may seem extraordinary to us that the simulations of women should have looked enough like "nature" to fool the most brilliant naturalist of modern times, Darwin, who attributed to them inherent traits of chastity, modesty, and self-sacrifice...

...The bar scene, for instance, might constitute such a new form...

...There is nothing more conventional than McDonald's and its sexual equivalent...

...Both sexes have now arrived at the point where any form of denial is seen as an unnatural interference with sexual impulses...

...There is the male bowerbird, for example, who builds a remarkable architectural structure, not for housekeeping but strictly for courtship purposes...

...One can almost hear the Biblical injunctions of the scientific elders: "Beware the foreign woman...

...If courtship practices reveal something about the environment, then the absence of courtship should tell us something about that environment also...

...Scientific American reports that French investigators (one might have guessed) refer to the postcopulatory songs of the male cricket as "triumphal songs...

...If such were the case, then our anatomy would have doomed all of us—men and women—to extinction ages ago...

...Men's current resistance to female aggression may be something more than culturally acquired...

...I threw her a fuck the equivalent of a fifteen-round fight," boasts the hero...

...In Norman Mailer's "The Time of Her Time," the sparring partners—one can hardly call them lovers—reveal that the pursuit of immediate sexual adventure brings them less often to the smell of the sea than that of the boxing ring...

...It should come as no surprise that what we have today is the courtship of one...

...Much of so-called courtship behavior, it would seem, turns out to be less sexual than defensive, a means of warding off aggression...

...It is precisely this social control that we seek to reject...

...Andreas finds it contrary to the nature of the masses to be stirred by Cupid's arrows—they have other things to do, such as plough the fields...

...In Edward Wilson's description, the males of this species "display frenetically on individual territories that are grouped tightly together in a communal area" and the "females wander singly or in groups from territory to territory, expressing their willingness to mate by crouching...

...Mainly a series of dialogues between lovers who are not married, at least not to each other, the work says little about consummation and nothing about reproduction—a fine example of the ability of writers in all ages to discount biological contingencies when talking about human affairs, especially with jealous husbands around...

...This leveling process is ironic when we consider that we have rejected courtship partly on the basis of a general distrust of societal conventions...

...Flees, bees, and insects of all sorts generally represent symbols of libertine promiscuity, flitting as they do from one body to another with impunity, particularly in less hygienic ages than our own...